Next week, on Tuesday, November 10th, we’ll be launching the first-ever, virtual CNI fall member meeting. Unlike the spring 2020 meeting, where we moved (and largely re-conceptualized) an already-planned in-person meeting virtual on extremely short notice, the fall meeting has been planned from the beginning as a virtual meeting. While we’ve kept some things from our in-person fall meetings (for example, the Executive Roundtable and my annual plenary on December 14, and Francine Berman’s already-announced Paul Evan Peters Award lecture on December 15), much else has changed. We’ve tried to apply what we’ve learned from our experience with the spring virtual meeting, and also what other organizations have learned from their efforts to move events to virtual formats. We’ll undoubtedly make more mistakes, but hopefully at least new ones, and will again be following up this meeting with an evaluation form to be sure we catch as many as possible; please be understanding and generous as we all try to navigate this new environment.
Basically, we’ll have four weeks of project briefings, each built around a major theme, starting November 10th. The first three weeks will conclude with a summary discussion session that I’ll lead which will take place Mondays at 4:00pm EST beginning on November 16th (there will not be a summary session for the 4th week, which will deal with responses to current crises and emerging developments). Recordings of the project briefings will be made available very quickly for registered participants from the session pages in Sched (https://cnifall2020virtualmembershipmeet.sched.com/) so that they can view as many as they wish before the week's summary session; nearly all sessions will be recorded (except for those whose speakers have asked us not to) and videos will be made publicly available through our YouTube and Vimeo channels, as usual, though this may take a little more time. There will be fewer synchronous project briefings than we usually have during our in-person meetings because we don’t want concurrent sessions in the online setting, and attention in the new Zoom universe is a very scarce and contended-for resource; however, we’ll be supplementing live sessions with additional offerings of pre-recorded, view on demand videos covering additional topics; some of these are updates on projects discussed at past CNI meetings.
For registered attendees: You will have access to all live project briefings and plenary sessions, as well as session videos, via Sched, https://cnifall2020virtualmembershipmeet.sched.com/. You will need a Sched account to view the meeting schedule, to see the video stream button for live and recorded sessions, and to create a personalized schedule and set up reminders. All registered attendees should have received an email invitation to the meeting Sched, with instructions and details.If you have not received an invitation from Sched, please contact Beth Secrist ( beth@cni.org) as soon as possible. For registration inquiries, please contact Jackie Eudell ( jackie@cni.org).
There are a few things we won’t be doing this year. We are not going to do a roadmap for the fall 2020 meeting; it doesn’t seem very useful given the way we’ve laid out the meeting (in the meeting evaluation we’ll ask about whether this was a good idea, and it’s a decision we are prepared to revisit in future). We are not going to issue a formal Program Plan update for 2020-2021 in the current environment; this would be an exercise in futility, as well as hubris. I will address both the current landscape and our programmatic foci in my December 14 plenary. And, alas, you are on your own for the reception and the Paul Evan Peters memorial shrimp on the evening of December 14; if you do celebrate, please take a moment to lift a glass to our community.
We’ll conclude the virtual fall member meeting on the two scheduled days of December 14 and 15. On December 14, we’ll hold the invitational executive roundtable from 12-2:30 Eastern (we may hold an additional round on December 16 or 17, depending on demand), and I’ll do my plenary talk at 3:00pm EST on Dec. 14, with plenty of time for questions and conversation.
On December 15, we have several plenary events scheduled:
From 12:00-1:00pm Eastern, we’ll have a panel of current CLIR fellows speaking to their work and their view of the current landscape. I’m very concerned that, in the current emergency, and with the migration of everything to virtual events that largely eliminate opportunities for serendipity and social networking, we are at risk of overlooking and failing the new and increasingly diverse group of emerging leaders joining our community. The CLIR fellows are one of the leading examples of such emerging leaders, and a group that CNI has long sought to support. We will be looking to do similar sessions in future meetings, highlighting additional CLIR fellows and perhaps others as well. In this connection, I want to also note that among our guests, we are once again being joined by both CLIR fellows and members of the current cadre of ARL Leadership and Career Development (LCDP) fellows, and I extend them a warm welcome.
From 3:00-4:30 Eastern, we’ll celebrate this year's Paul Evan Peters Award recipient Francine Berman, and learn from her Paul Evan Peters Memorial Lecture.
We will be posting details of all of the December 14-15 events on the meeting website and Sched as they are finalized.
I hope to see many of you next week at the launch of our virtual fall meeting, and throughout the weeks that follow. Please be in touch with me, or Diane Goldenberg-Hart ( diane@cni.org) if you have any questions or concerns.
Clifford Lynch Director, CNI
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